A Likely Lad

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But I saw heroin ruin the lives of so many people - many of whom you'd never have expected to get mixed up in such things. Doherty comes across as a loveable rogue at heart, who just made the mistake of staring too deeply into the void for too long, only for the void to then hold him in its death-grip for nearly two decades.

I miss something what Keith Richards said in Life ,that he didn’t advice to follow him in the hell of the drugs because his case is somehow unique . Not everyone who gets entangled in a life of drug addiction is lucky enough to come out the other side, and I think Doherty is careful not to simply assume that he's now completely out of the woods. Common people often regard rock and roll stars and artist such as Pete Doherty as someone who’s opinion attitudes words etc are important . Despite the exhaustive accounts of drug taking, at no point is the reader told why the narrator finds the effects of heroin or crack cocaine so hard to live without. I’m hard pushed to think of another musician who managed to be so prolific with such a sustained drug problem.Carl was never really that into it, but sometimes I’d persuade him to busk, and we’d do ‘Twist and Shout’ on repeat. This memoir, dictated but not written by Doherty, follows him from highly intelligent and relatively sheltered boy, to university drop out, to drug addled singer in defining early noughties indie outfit The Libertines. That would have been useful at least , if Pete feels like this, to say a bit more in that he had the chance to survive this drug abuse but more are those who had no chance.

It keeps you pretty glued with a veilde promise of something wonderful to come but sadly never really gets there. He describes one infamously terrible Babyshambles gig – a bandmate had attempted suicide just beforehand and arrived wearing “his long woollen scarf that he’d used to hang himself still connected to the branch that had snapped”. But hearing Pete speak now with a calm persona, a rational outlook, and no longer that wandering maelstrom of chaos, it sounds like he's finally figured out who he is and what he wants to be.

But all the while Doherty and Barât are committed to the sound and aesthetic that would define them – intricate, overlapping guitar riffs, muddy production and knowing, kitchen-sink lyrics, anchored by two charismatic frontmen competing for the spotlight. There are the years when Doherty worked as a gravedigger or pulling pints, stealing from the cash register. Hope he'll continue writing and playing and drawing and doing all sorts of art for many years to come. He sometimes made use of tabloid curiosity, selling photographs and stories to pay debts, a naivety guiding his approach: “I thought I’d be able to crack it. Despite the admission that “it was tricky, really, thinking about how you get a band to function at the same time as being in active addiction”, the defiant revelation that the singer believed himself to be “in a raging war against the industry to prove… I could get music out there and make a living from it and not have to play by their rules of having to go to rehab” implies that his deranged dependency was not so much an illness as an ideology.